Hedges & Company

06/03/2026

Cool, we made the Marketing LTB list for Top 10 Digital Marketing Agencies in 2026, for the aftermarket auto parts & accessories brands category! Thanks, Marketing LTB!

10 Best Automotive Digital Marketing Agencies in 2026

05/21/2026

Mike Chung at the Auto Care Association had Jon on his latest podcast interview, talking about "Aftermarket Digital Marketing That Actually Sells." They got into the weeds on product data, schema, AI optimization, and a whole lot of things that work to sell automotive parts and accessories.

Mike also did his famous "lightning round" of random questions at the end..."pop vs. soda?" "Wheel of Fortune or Jeopardy?" Fun stuff.

Thanks to Mike and to Jacki Lutz for the invite and everything!

https://www.autocare.org/detail-pages/podcast/aftermarket-digital-marketing-that-actually-sells

Women in Auto Care: A Global Community Auto Care Association

04/30/2026

Aftermarket marketers, changes are coming to fix your ad tracking with accurate attribution. Check out the great 27-page paper from Google called "The Science of Demand."

We recommend you learn about server-side tagging if you're not already familiar with it. Server-side tagging is a solution for attribution in a cookie-less and AI-fueled world.

Better attribution = better understanding of what your media dollars are doing = better ROAS.

New Google Tag Gateway makes server-side tagging easier. This is a major initiative for our clients in Q2 and Q3.

And, there's a new acronym (oh no!) to learn: MMM, which stands for Marketing Mix Model. If you're responsible for your company's Google Ads budget, MMM is your newest tool in the toolbox.

Your newest tool has a name: "Meridian," which is Google's open-source MMM. It uses a Bayesian regression model and statistical inference with AI to learn from your data. Meridian will help you understand top of funnel (ToFu), middle of funnel (MoFu) and bottom of funnel (BoFu) campaigns, interactions and results. It'll give you visibility into your Performance Max and Demand Gen campaigns.

04/22/2026

Last weekend on April 18, the City of Hudson, Ohio (where our main office is located) had their annual electronics recycling day.

It was a little surprising how many obsolete pieces of equipment we had in the office...a server, 3 desktop computers, 3 laptops, 20 keyboards, 22 hard drives, network switches, modems and really old iPhones.

We're glad to be able to get rid of all this stuff in an environmentally-responsible way. Speaking of, today (this is posted April 22, 2026) is Earth Day!

And, of course, since client confidentiality is extremely important to us, we had to personally witness the destruction of all hard drives! One of these pictures is the machine that does it. Hard drives were destroyed to NSA and DoD compliance guidelines for physical damage.

City of Hudson, Ohio - Government Visit Hudson OH

04/22/2026

Do you sell OEM replacement parts? Be sure to monitor your server logs and Google Analytics right now for web scraping bots!

There have been huge spikes in bot traffic on many replacement parts websites in the past week, all coming from China, Singapore, Hong Kong, Vietnam and Pakistan.

Bots will scrape an entire website over one to four days, then disappear. The traffic is attributed to "Direct" and averages about 3 seconds. It's easy to spot in Google Analytics.

On one website, we saw over 100,000 bot sessions over 3 days!

It looks like someone overseas is doing "market research" on OEM replacement parts. If you see a spike in bot traffic like this, try to block it on your server or CDN.

02/25/2026

We're excited to announce we're a Google Premier Partner for the 10th year in a row! We originally became a Google Partner in 2013, then when Google rolled out the Premier Partner tier in 2016, we were the first automotive aftermarket agency to qualify.

To be a Google Premier Partner you have to go through annual certifications, manage a minimum client ad spend and utilize best practices. Google considers its Premier Partners to be in the top 3% of agencies in the United States.

We have access to top-tier help with our great Google reps, and our clients take advantage of new beta programs before they're rolled out to the rest of the world.

02/24/2026

Google Shopping announcement!
Parts and accessories eCommerce companies: Check your Merchant Center feeds and API, and update if necessary.
If you're a Merchant API beta user, or using the Content API for Shopping, you'll need to migrate to Merchant API v1.
Beta users must migrate by February 28, 2026.
Content API for Shopping users have more breathing room, you have until August 18, 2026.
If you have an agency managing this, if they use Google Merchant Center Next for your products, they should have already received notices on this.
If you don't use the API at all, this is a good time to consider starting with Merchant API v1 to automate product uploads, update your product inventory and prices, monitor diagnostics, and more!
(Hedges & Company clients, don't worry, you're already covered!)

02/19/2026

Well, as it turns out, we're not the first ones to try other ways to turn auto parts into money. Here's a recently discovered video from Merlin turning a big block crankshaft into money.

We really think digital marketing is still the best way, but Merlin had something working with alchemy.

If alchemy doesn't work for you or your current agency, give us a call.

02/18/2026

We posted marketing predictions for 2026 from Google, then re-interpreted them for the automotive aftermarket.

Just last year it seems like everyone jumped on everything AI, chasing the latest AI update of the month or press release. It was tough trying to figure out what actually worked.

2026 is when people start to figure out what really works in AI.

We also dig into what's coming with agentic AI.



https://hedgescompany.com/blog/2026/02/marketing-predictions-from-google/

02/17/2026

We're continuing to experiment here at the secret Hedges Laboratory, looking for new ways to turn auto parts into money.

After weeks of testing, digital marketing still works the best.

We did, however, hire a magician to stop in and give it a try on his way to a children's birthday party. Not bad, but we couldn't repeat the trick consistently.

More testing!